Li Delin

4 results arranged by date

1. Beyond censors' reach, free expression thrives, to a point

By Sophie Beach

On March 24, 2012, investigative journalist Yang Haipeng posted on his Sina Weibo microblog a story he had heard that alleged a link between Neil Heywood, an English businessman who had been found dead in a Chongqing hotel, and Bo Xilai, the powerful Chongqing Communist Party chief. His post is widely recognized as the first significant public mention of a connection between the two men and it spread like wildfire online before being deleted the next day. A month later, Yang’s Sina Weibo account, which had 247,000 followers, was shut down.

Sina's Twitter-like microblog service Weibo has released new
guidelines to restrict users who share banned content, according to
international news reports. It's the first time such guidelines target users
who adopt puns, homonyms, and other veiled
references to discuss censored news stories without using keywords on the
propaganda department's blacklist, the reports said.

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New York, April 25, 2012--The U.S.-based, Chinese-language news
website Boxun has
come under two crippling denial-of-service attacks in the past week as the
outlet sought to report on the unfolding murder and corruption scandal
involving former senior Communist Party leader Bo Xilai. The attacks forced Boxun to change its hosting company twice,
the site's founder and editor Watson Meng told the Committee to Protect
Journalists.

Meng, who spoke to CPJ from his home in North Carolina, said he had not been able to trace the source of the denial-of-service attacks but believed they were in reprisal for Boxun's reporting on Bo Xilai and his ally Zhou Yongkang, the Communist Party's security chief, whose political fate has also been the subject of speculation this month. The first attack, on Friday, was so severe that it not only threatened Boxun but its entire hosting service, name.com. Denial-of-service attacks overload host servers with external communications requests, thus preventing websites from functioning.

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New York, April 2, 2012--The Committee to Protect Journalists
is concerned by Chinese authorities' recent clampdown on the Internet after
rumors circulated about politician Bo Xilai's
dismissal from the Communist Party leadership in
Chongqing. In recent days, authorities have shut down several microblog
sites and detained and targeted Internet users.